Legilimens and Occlumens and Snape's Reasons

[Arya]

No: HPFGUIDX 85856

Zinaida wrote:
 
> I also have a question regarding the thoughts/memories fetch 
> legilemency - can a legilemens choose what he wishes to access or 
> it's random?  Because it seems somewhat suspicious to me that *all* 
> Harry's memories that surfaced were of a markedly unpleasant quality 
> (humiliations, fears, or otherwise embarassing), many of them not 
> recent and obviously not what Harry would naturally be thinking about 
> at the moment.  Was Snape purposefully extracting a particular kind 
> of memories - acting as a dementor, of sorts - to humiltiate 
> Harry?                   

Arya Now:
I wrote a long post about a week ago (#84890) that went through each and 
every Occlumency lesson and cast that we saw in OotP and proposes that 
Legilimency is indeed a specific quest to ask for scenes and memories of a 
specific nature.  By this theory, Boggarts (searching for worst fear), 
Dementors (searching most despairing/traumatic/awful memories), The 
Mirror of Erised (searching for heart's greatest desire), and even the Sorting 
Hat (searching for the motives that drives a person to be who they are) are all 
objects enchanted with Legilimencing abiltiies.  Even Dumbledore's use of the 
Mirror of Erised to couple the Mirror's enchantment with a conditional 
switching spell with the stone shows further evidence of this, I believe.

The link to the previous post is here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/84890

Arya